Revert to Last Save
by algorhythmic
Summary: Link wanders Hyrule, searching for Koroks and doing meaningless fetch quests as the world burns around him. But what else can our hero do? He's already saved the world six times! Each time he wakes up after defeating Ganon and reuniting with Zelda, the world has reverted to its previous state. This is a story about finding hope, laughter, and love in a mad, mad world. ZeLink
1. Chapter 1

Revert to Last Save

Chapter One: Of Koroks and Kierkegaard

Link crested over the hill on a black clydesdale, on his way to Northern Akkala. He saw the thin peninsula of Tarrey Town and wondered for the hundredth time what the hell he had been thinking helping all the -sons develop a village at a place so obviously dangerous. What if one of the kids chased a ball off the edge! What if the single rock bridge connecting the tiny town to the mainland collapsed! Most of all, given the sick loop this whole stupid country was stuck in, why did he even care?

Holding the bridge of his nose in a lame attempt to stave off a slowly brewing headache, he, or rather his horse Midnight, trotted lazily towards the town. He had set out this afternoon, after a long nap, with the intent to check out the strange rock formations north of the Akkala Wilds, in the hope that one of the few dozen koroks he had yet to track down would pop up there. Honestly, though, he wasn't that interested, and given that they had started this far south, it might be a better idea at this point to see how the -sons and company were holding up. Besides, these days he mostly let Midnight do the choosing, and the horse had been rooting its way down the slopes of Kaepora Pass, closer and closer to Tarrey Town, stopping to graze on tasty looking bits of grass here and there for the last half hour.

"Come on now, you beautiful fat bastard, you've been eating all afternoon" Link said. His eyes softened and the lines on his brow loosened as he nudged the horse towards the rock bridge, patting it on the neck and cooing simultaneously sweet & profane nothings into its ear. He loved this horse.

In a flash, he saw her blond hair at the edge of his vision, heard the bell-tinkle of her giggles. Zelda. Link shook his head, then glanced around at his peripherals, neck bent and eyes wary. No. Just a memory. It was just a memory.

"Link! What the hell are you doing?" Hudson's voice broke Link from his nervous reverie. Glancing around at the mouth of the stone overpass, Link couldn't see the middle-aged man, and worried that he had really finally lost it. Zelda's hauntings were not too uncommon, and were fairly explicable: he had loved her, lost her, slept a century, and slain a demon to get her back, and then lost her again. He had done all that like, what, six times now? But if he was beginning to hallucinate about the friendly carpenter...well maybe all those potions made from beetles and bokoblins really weren't the healthiest idea.

After a few more moments, Link raised his head again, and finally noticed the peak of Hudson's truly offensive bowlcut over Midnight's head. The horse had stopped and was nosing the man's bag rudely, searching for snacks. Link began to scold him, but Hudson just laughed and pulled out a few apples. When Link raised an eyebrow, Hudson laughed even harder.

"Beedle was here yesterday and said you were in the area, I made sure to take a trip out to the trees in the enchanted copse down south a ways and pick up a few."

Link knew the copse, and knew why the villagers thought it was enchanted. He shivered a little, at the near-violent intimacy of those giant magical weirdos, and noticed Hudson was staring at him again beneath the world's bushiest eyebrows. How a man could have such a positively pubic forest above his eyes and on his upper lip, and yet have the straightest, most conical bowlcut Link had ever seen, was always a mystery for our Hero. Link started to laugh, and continued to laugh, at the bemused and slightly worried look on Hudson's face, until he was nearly crying. Link wished he could explain to the older man how his totally outlandish and yet utterly mundane appearance, along with his invaluable kindness, were exactly what he needed to keep heroing on for another day.

"Come on Hudson, let's grab a drink. And for Hylia's sake, will you build a damn fence along this bridge?" Link whipped Midnight into a gallop, leaving Hudson to walk slowly behind, shaking his head. A warm smile played across his features as he watched the brave young man holler and whoop his way into the town he had crossed the country to populate.

* * *

Several hours later, Link was solidly buzzed outside the Slippery Falcon, and doing his best to prevent the more visibly inebriated Granté from trying to literally paint the town red. Actually, Link was doing his best not to fall over laughing as Fyson anxiously waved his wings, running interference on Granté as the young Akkalan engineer-armorer strode confidently towards the shelf where the normally headstrong Rito sold a few buckets of the garish hues the rest of the town was dressed in.

Link had burst into town around three in the afternoon and headed right over to Granté's house with Hudson, and the three began making their way through several tall mugs of mead and even taller tales. Hudson and Granté did most of the talking, and Link drank, listened, and laughed. Fyson had joined the fun after closing up shop for the day, Hudson had left for dinner with his wife, and the three had made their way over to the shop at some point. The tables outside made for a glorious place to drink and be merry.

"Hey Hero!" Fyson yelled sarcastically. "Some help here?" Link raised his hands, palms forward, playing innocent.

Granté spun around to face Link, suddenly distracted. "Ahh, the mayor himself." Link rolled his eyes. Granté put his hands up, fingers curled into his palms, as if he was ready to box. Link looked at him more seriously, was the guy really that drunk? Ever the unpredictable, Granté extended his arms out into a T-pose, and then began wiggling his whole body, arms included. Suddenly, he took another sip of his mead, puffed out his cheeks mischeviously, and spouted it towards the hero.

Link neatly sidestepped the stream of warm booze, and Granté ran away cackling.

"Sonofuh-" Fyson began, then took a deep inhale and a sip of his own mead, and went looking for a mop or a rag. Link went sprinting after the gleeful trickster, and quickly caught up to him. They played a short game of ring-around-the-rosy around the fountain, and then Link managed to get a hand on him. Granté, giggling and slightly out of breath, surrendered.

"Please Sir Hero!" He pled mockingly in a high-pitched voice, "Twas but a training exercise, designed to prepare you for the dangers of the fearsome oc-to-rok!" He put extra emphasis on each syllable of octorok.

I'll show you an octorok, Link thought, and forced Granté into a chokehold. He then shoved the drunk man's head into the water for half a second, and brought him up again. This should sober him up, he thought. However, Granté had taken advantage of this situation to reload, and this time the wannabe-octorok's projectile hit Link square in the face.

Stunned, Link let go of his friend and they both collapsed to the ground. Granté, apparently an effervescent ball of unending energy, began immediately making dirt angels. Link, for about the tenth time that day, burst out laughing.

* * *

Approaching midnight, Granté safely tucked in, and Fyson off to roost on the second floor of his shop, Link was alone at the fountain of the goddess, buzz wearing off slowly. The town truly was a wonderful little place, his home away from home, and this fountain was his favorite spot in it. Flickering reflections of moon- and torchlight shone off of its rippling waters. The breeze was surprisingly light given their considerable altitude and proximity to the cliff face, and quite warm this time of year. It smelled of something sweet, probably coming from Hagie and Ruli's home. Link smiled, thinking of the ridiculous cake he had made for Hunnie. It had lit her up, her face bright and eyes beaming like Zelda when they had finally defeated Ganon, and could look out towards a future together. Link turned his head abruptly, as if to look away from something painful. He began to remember.

Half a dozen times now, he had seen that sight. Zelda's sad smile, her downturned eyes. Half a dozen times he had made his way into Ganon's domain, the castle that had held generations of Hyrule's royalty and now housed a sealed demon, a great old one kept from ravaging the outside world only by a century of stubbornness from the only woman he had ever loved. He had slunk, or swam, or climbed, or charged his way into the castle, all the way up to the top. Six times he had slain that demon with her help, and held her hand as they looked towards their new horizon.

Each time, he awoke at the last place he slept, his future with her just the stuff that dreams are made on. The first time was the hardest, he had barely had enough experience, he had rushed right to her after barely defeating the four champions, and plunged himself into the madness of that castle and that giant red-eyed demon. He snuck through the grounds of the castle, and spent the better part of several days hanging on castle walls to avoid flying guardians or hiding in dark corners covered in moblin blood to trick their sensitive snouts. Somehow, he had made it to the throne room, and by some divine favor even beyond that, he and Zelda had come out on top in the monstrous fight that ensued.

Then, it was all stolen away from him.

He remembered waking up, in the Woodland Stable just south of the Korok forest. Initially he had assumed he had collapsed from exhaustion, and he spent the better part of a morning wondering around, looking for her. He kept asking the confused employees of the stable where Zelda was, where the princess who had vanished one hundred years ago was, as if she had been right next to him the evening before. First they worried for this strange traveler, then eventually they worried about what he might do to them, deranged and confused as he clearly was. He left the next day, and spent a week riding around Central Hyrule with Midnight. Eventually, he had to conclude that he had dreamt the whole thing.

Doubting his own sanity, once more unto the breach he went. It was when he made it into the castle again that he knew it had been no dream. Perhaps a vision, but no dream. All the monsters were the same, the castle's layout was the same, even the way the great tusked beast curled around her sealing sun in its last vain attempts at domination and corruption. How could he have even remembered a dream with such clarity? How could he have dreamt of her heartbreaking question, and his inability to answer, at the end of it all?

"Do you really remember me?" She had said, green eyes dewy, ceremonial garb muddied from the prior battle. He remembered some, but not all.

The third time he awoke at those stables, he knew it had to be a curse, some dark time magic set upon the two of them, and the whole of Hyrule in fact. He thought perhaps he could break it, if he could answer her question. Or maybe he just couldn't bear to see her sad smile once more.

So he set about the country looking for places, people, paintings, anything and everything that could trigger his subconscious to dig up those precious memories from so many years ago. It took him the better part of a year. A year of frustrated wandering, cold nights, and lonely days, never knowing if what he was doing would actually help anything at all. Eventually, he thought he had pieced it all back together again; the most important parts of them, at least.

Link swam right to the top that time, using the series of moats and waterfalls which he had calculated as the most efficient route given his previous experiences. He had become much stronger during his wanderings, and had even come across the master sword deep in the Korok forest. The fight was challenging, but Link felt in control. After their victory, Link even heard more out of Zelda! When she continued to speak, when they walked together along that grassy ridge beyond the castle, speaking of their past and future, he thought he had triumphed. He thought he had beaten this curse, whatever it was, and they could finally walk together into the future as one.

It was not to be. Yet, he did not give up, he threw himself back at that dark fortress and the primal beast within. He was angry now. Again and again he scaled the walls and tiptoed through the hallways of the corrupted keep.

He started his journey from different places, the Wetland Stable, the ruins of Mabe Village, hell one time he even slept on top of the giant arcane pillars surrounding the castle like the points of a pentagram, and flew in with his glider from their.

Link slew the demon Ganon, and Zelda sealed it away, over and over. By the last few times, he was walking right through the front gates, destroying guardians with a single arrow, dancing around the brutal blades of the silver Lynels with practiced ease. But no matter what he did, no matter how thoroughly he searched the land or slayed the enemies of man, he woke up after defeating Ganon, and the beast was never defeated at all. The princess remained locked in her own dying seal.

The korok finally put him over the edge. Throughout his journey, the mischievous little bastards had been hiding in the most random places throughout the country, encouraging him to solve their little puzzles, complete their silly challenges, or just find their ridiculous hiding spots. It was slightly annoying, but they were good-natured creatures, and on some days it was a nice break from slaying another wave of monsters or fetching some meaningless trinkets or materials for a villager. He had been asked to find them all, and he put effort in at the margins to do so.

Sometimes they were in particularly strange or remote places, and he began to wonder whether they had some mystical ability to survive without nutrients. As Link's journey wore on, and soured as the futility of his primary quest became more and more apparent, he began to wonder if the koroks were even sentient. They always said the same things, and he thought he sensed something vaguely mechanistic behind their leaf masks. Of course, it was possible, even likely, that he was just going insane. Either way, he began to feel as if they were just some cruel trick put their by the powers that be to remind him of just one more thing he would never be able to complete.

Finally, on his seventh trip to the castle, a full eighteen months after he had saved Hyrule the first time, Link broke. He had climbed his way up to the throne room, but on a whim, decided to continue climbing. Maybe there was some key up here to breaking this horrible curse. He made his way up to the parapets above, and even climbed to the tip of the tallest tower. What did he find up there?

A fucking Korok. How? Why? All it did was giggle woodenly and float a few feet above the highest point of the most dangerous place in all of Hyrule, not even two hundred feet from Ganon himself. And so, in this moment of utter absurdity, our hero accepted his fate. He realized that this whole situation, his whole quest, and maybe even his entire life was part of some sick joke, some meaningless game of the gods.

Zelda would ever slip through his hands like sand in a sieve, and the land would remain forever blighted. She was the lily in the field and the bird in the air, and every time he got close he felt farther away. Maybe, he sometimes wondered idly, she didn't even exist. So he floated, purposeless, around the lands of Hyrule.

Link was startled out of his dark thoughts by the howling of the wind. Tattered red clouds closed in on the eerily lit sky far too quickly, like long red incisors ready to pierce the moon. Then the moon itself began to bleed. Link heaved a deep sigh. He didn't give a damn about Ganon anymore, and he wasn't even sure that he believed in Zelda or his own memory anymore. But he was a hollow man most days, and the places and people who made him feel a little less empty were absolutely invaluable. One of those places and several of those people were right here. So, he drew his sword, and whistled for Midnight. Besides, with her memory fresh in his mind, it wasn't like he was going to get any sleep that night.

* * *

From deep within her time-numbed slumber, a young blonde woman with emerald eyes and pointed ears watched her appointed knight dance in the red of the moon. At first, she had worried for him most on nights like these, when he dashed himself against waves of enemies for no reason except to save a few townspeople here, a few travelers there. Now, as she watched him weave between axes, deflect moblin clubs twice his size, and drop metal blocks onto unsuspecting lizalfos from thirty feet above, she no longer worried for his body. She worried for his mind. And her own.

Since he had first awoken a little more than three years earlier, she had been regaining more and more of her own consciousness. At first she had felt little more than an echo of her former self, an echo which she projected out into Hyrule, searching for him. By the time they took down Ganon the first time, she was nearly herself again. Her memories of their conversations after that time were faint and smudged, but bright. Then, blankness, again.

It was as if someone was resetting her consciousness each time they won. Whatever cruel fates in charge of the world, the three goddesses, or something more malign hiding behind that mask, seemed to have abandoned Hyrule, and its two champions. She deduced that Link, in turn, had not been able to deal with the pain of losing her at what should've been their greatest moment of happiness and victory, time after time.

She felt all this more than she knew it, and she watched over him day and night, waiting for him to drop small hints about what had happened. Whatever was going on, he remembered it a lot more clearly than she did. Locked in a stasis of her own making, she had naught but time to think, and she waited for him to serve up more clues, so she could think a way out of this cold, cursed labyrinth they wandered in.

As the last beast vanished in the few square miles surrounding Tarrey Town in a puff of black and purple smoke, Zelda whispered in his ear.

"Link. I will figure this out. For us. For Hyrule."

She saw his head jerk sideways, and for a second his haunted cerulean eyes met her warm emeralds, and his mouth fell open into a perfect O.

He closed his mouth, and there was a slight quiver at one edge of his mouth. Then he spoke, voice hoarse, hands shaking.

"You were always stronger than me, my love."


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2: Tristan-Truman, Maniac Lachrimae, Walkürenschwimmen

The few days had been a blur. After departing Tarrey Town the same night he had arrived, Link had ridden a few days north to the Akkala Wildlands. After a short and easy exercise against a red lynel in the pale light of dawn, he made his way up to the strange rock formations just east of the Lomei Labyrinth Island. They rose up a few hundred meters above the brine, emerging from the base of the sloping cliff to the west like the massive shale and sandstone teeth of some behemoth buried at the edge of the world. Link tethered Midnight to a tree on the mainland, and spent most of the day free-climbing the shale needles for no reason besides curiosity.

Above the long shadows of the afternoon, he rested at the peak of the tallest of the formation, examining the barren geology and churning expanse below him. Wolf meat from the previous evening's hunt crackled and turned above a small but adequate fire. The apex of the towering tooth was so pointed that it had taken him the better part of the last half hour and several failed attempts to place the logs in a way that was stable enough to actually light. He shook his head at his own foolishness. There was a time when his pack would've been stuffed with a variety of foodstuffs, ranging from inedible pebblit chow to gourmet delights. Nowadays, he had neither the foresight nor the inclination to properly prepare for his fickle jaunts. So there he was, roasting a steak on the tip of a giant toothpick that was perhaps the most geographically distant point from the rotten core of Hyrule.

He shivered at the memories from his time in that castle. It was not the recollection of his battles of Ganon that frightened him; that festering embodiment of power and rage was threatless at this point. What he feared was the sharp pang of his happy memories with Zelda beyond Ganonical Hyrule. He was afraid of the gigantic alien obelisks surrounding the keep and the lurid violet of the demonic energy which coursed through the air between them; the warp and weft of her dark prison. Link could defeat the apotheosis of evil, but he couldn't swing a sword at the structure of their curséd reality.

Sitting sage-style on the tip of the shale needle, he recalled her appearance just a few nights prior, after the bloodshed outside of Tarrey Town. Though ethereal, he couldn't ignore the incredible realism in the details of her phantasm: the gold flecks speckling her verdant irises, the gentle falsetto of her Hylian lilt, the pain and vulnerability barely perceptible beneath her determined declaration.

Goddess, he missed her.

Goddess be damned, he didn't know if she was real, or just the product of the sickness of his own mind. The princess could've died a century ago, sacrificing her life to seal Ganon. Her ghostly presence could just be the strings with which the goddess used to make him dance. If the Hylia was really out there, it held to cruel reason that she could nail even the fibrosity of Zelda's komorebi eyes.

As day slammed violently into night in a splash of oranges and reds upon the sky and sea, Link became more and more convinced that the world connived against him, and that the Zelda he saw and heard the other day and whom had haunted him since his reawakening was either a figment of his imagination or an artifice of the goddess.

In a strange calm he resolved to abandon this cruel country, his quest, his love, all of it, desperate to be free of these passions that led only to pain. As night descended like a guillotine, he went with it, off the sharp edge of the sandstone tooth and out to the north, floating towards the open ocean. Away.

Drifting on a slight breeze fifty meters above the ocean, he slammed into nothing. There was nothing visible in front of him, but he had unquestionably barreled into some sort of invisible wall at the edge of the world. In shock, he dropped his glider and fell down towards the sea, arms and legs wheeling in comic helplessness.

In a short time, he splashed into the sea like a sack of stones. Given his durability after he had made his way through each of the one hundred and twenty shrines spread throughout the country, the fall wasn't fatal. Link sunk down through the deep blackness of the open ocean at night, and the cold abyss spun beneath him. Blearily, he realized he could hardly feel anything at all. An immovable weight sat on his sternum, and there was a pulsing hotness beneath his chest which he couldn't identify: a broken rib, the desperate pump of his heart? Beyond those few stimuli, there was nothing but ink and dizziness. The thought of the unseen barrier which had arrested his flight rose up like a wormy apple in a tub of molasses.

As his consciousness faded, he imagined it encasing the country in which he had spent over a century but only a quarter of a life's worth of laughter and suffering. It was a colossal, transparent, impenetrable eggshell from which no beak, no new life, could ever emerge. It was the spatial counterpart to the temporal loop which Hyrule had been trapped in for the last century, or perhaps from the very advent of creation. Yes, perhaps even the primordial soup from which the three goddesses had stirred and spooned the mythic gobs of man and monster that made Hyrule was just sitting in a bowl, congealing on a bookshelf, until someone noticed the stink and tossed the whole thing out. Link had no regrets as he let himself sink.

Then Zelda's phantom emerged at his side, her mellow luminescence a pupil-tightening brilliance in the absolute dark. He watched her fuzzy form reach for him and pass through his cold palm. He watched her beg, then plead, then finally scream, at him, at it all. Her pain was too much. He reached for her as his consciousness slipped.

* * *

Outside the Dueling Peaks Stable a blonde young man with sideburns far too long wore a green hat. His hat closely resembled the cap worn by the hero in the tapestries of legend, but stood more erect atop his head, and also had fitted ear coverings. It was as if some mad soul had chosen to design a parody of the hero's cap. The mad soul in question had actually intended to use it to more closely resemble the fairies whom he so greatly admired, but Link had no use for the intentions of its creator. He wore the hat because it was both atrocious and vaguely, farcically reminiscent of the cap which espoused his most righteous role as the champion of hyrule, the appointed knight, the avatar of courage, the madcap he-

"Link! Are you really wearing that?" The burly Rito standing next to him and holding an accordion interrupted his rambling thoughts.

"For the last time Kass, yes! Busking is about standing out. You just squeeze your box and I'll figure my part out." Link said, a confident smile on his face and a wild gleam in his eyes.

"The hat isn't even that bad, but the rest of the ensemble…" Kass trailed off. The rest of the ensemble consisted of a skintight crewneck made of an unidentifiable material that actually glowed slightly. The black of the shirt was intended to blend in with the night, while the glowing bones on the shirt created an eerie floating ribcage effect. However, in the dusk, the black of the shirt was still clearly visible, and Link just looked like an idiot.

The shorts, well, the shorts were just _so_ short. It looked as if they had been designed for a child, and the person in question, while not quite an adult, was certainly no boy. His muscular thighs strained against the shorts, and not much was left to the imagination between waist and quadriceps. Yikes.

The collective effect of this young man's garments was a jarring one, and indeed led the few locals who did not recognize him came to believe that he was quite possibly unhinged. His additional accoutrements only served to further exacerbate their confusion and worry, they were: one lynel bow, of the most savage variety; one blue shield, the glow and design of which a few of the more grizzled travelers in the small crowd associated with the weapons of the guardians; one strange sheathed sword, the inch or so of blade exposed near the hilt emitting a powerful blue radiance; and one gorgeous lute, the entirety of which was intricately carved, displaying scenes from Hyrule's recent history.

The lute was truly a wonder: here was Calamity Ganon winding its beastly coils around the once-proud keep, there were the profiles of the four doomed champions, and at the center of it all was the sacrificial lamb herself, Princess Zelda, heir to a throne of nothing and saviour of all that surrounded that throne. Running his fingers over the lacquered cuts in the wood, the man in blonde lost a bit of his smile. However, his feathered compatriot quickly got his attention.

"Ready?" The Rito asked gently.

"Always." The blonde man answered, a certain unidentifiable lightness in his eyes.

"Ladies and gentleman!" The madly clad minstrel began, with a toothy smile. "I am happy to present to you the Hylian Cassocks, of which I am one half!" The audience gave a few small cheers and whistles, to which the lutist continued: "He's Kass and I suck!" The crowd immediately fell silent, and the lutist himself sniggered loudly at his own terrible joke. The Rito rolled his eyes and began to play, and the swordsman began to sing and strum:

" _Flow, my tears, fall from your springs!_

 _Exiled for ever, let me mourn;_

 _Where night's black bird her sad infamy sings,_

 _There let me live forlorn."_

They started low in tone and quickly ascended. The mix of classical strings and the folk-inflected aerophone was strange and wonderful. The song was slow and grave. Link's mellifluous baritone and the hymn-like nature of the song were a clear shock to many in the crowd. After a short time, the people surrounding them began to dance in pairs. A host of fireflies floated over the shallow pool around the nearby shrine in languid chaos. The lutist strummed dreamily, the accordionist let his bellows breathe deep, and the people wound a slow progression around the bonfire next to the stable.

Back during the height of the Hyrulean Monarchy, a performance like this was a courtly affair, sans accordion. The nobles, in grand gowns and elegant suits, had danced a pavan at the start of many a royal function to music such as this. In fact, they had danced to this is exact song, and more than once. Link knew, because he had stood guard in the ballroom dozens of times, as barely more than a child. There he had watched the young princess squirm uncomfortably as she was forced to dance with many of the most powerful men in the kingdom. As a boy born into the royal guard, Link's training had been constant and without mercy, but he did not envy the princess during moments such as those. Even in those days, she was much more comfortable among the musty stacks of the Great Library, or in the Royal Courtyard catching crickets. And even then, she sacrificed her own comfort and happiness for the sake of her duty.

Link's voice shook as he began the final stanzas of the old song:

" _From the highest spire of contentment_

 _My fortune is thrown;_

 _And fear and grief and pain for my deserts, for my deserts_

 _Are my hopes, since hope is gone._

 _Hark! you shadows that in darkness dwell,_

 _Learn to contemn light_

 _Happy, happy they that in hell_

 _Feel not the world's despite."_

As the old song came to its close, and the sways and spins of the audience wound down, Kass thought he saw a single, glistening, tear trail down the hero's face. He extended a feathered hand to the shoulder of his friend. By the time he had made contact, Link had turned towards him with a roguish smile and a raised eyebrow. All traces of the despair Kass suspected were gone.

The old bard put it simply: "Twas excellent."

The young champion's close-lipped smile broke into a proud, open one. Kass laughed. The boy didn't talk unless he had to, but he was truly a pleasure to listen to, as the evening's performance had certified.

As they made their way back to the stable's grand tent, Link felt something very wrong. The world began to twist and tilt, all colors and shapes blurring together. Over his shoulder, Link thought he heard the sound of Zelda's voice, and he turned to see her phantasm fading away, sobbing a thanks. Suddenly, a cerulean brilliance suffused the wide world, and Link began to wretch uncontrollably.

* * *

The hero sunk down through the stygian waters, eyes wide shut; open, yet seeing nothing. His respiratory muscles spasmed involuntarily as his body struggled to live, irrespective of his vacillating will. The princess went down with him, unaffected by gravity yet determined to be with him until the end. She had swept through a torrent of emotions over the last sixty seconds. Language had gradually failed her as she progressed from vocal worry to pseudo-linguistic rage and finally to wordless, weeping despair.

The sky far above them boomed, and a crack of lightning briefly lit even the depths that they had sunk to. It struck the water directly above them. Then the sword on his back began to glow, and a voice emerged from it: "Hojotoho! Hojotoho! Heiaha! Heiaha!" it sounded out inexplicably, like some warcry from a forgotten age.

The voice was aged, and somehow artificial. Zelda recognized it from her flight to the Korok Forest after Link's last stand in front of Fort Hateno.

"Fi?! Is that you?" She shouted, voice hoarse.

"Voice modulation test complete. Speaker is utilizing a known Hylian dialect. Natural language processing engaged. Translating thought-speech from binary now." The sword had a tinny voice, artificial, yet distinctly feminine, and it glowed rhythmically, mimicking the cadence of it's speech.

"Hey Zelda." The artificial spirit in the legendary sword said casually.

"Fi! We need to help Link, now!" The princess urged.

"Yeah no kidding. Hypoxic convulsions aren't a joke. He's roughly one hundred and seventeen seconds from clinical death." Fi's voice had a cheeriness to it that hinted at sociopathy.

"Do something! I'm immaterial, this is just a projection of my consciousness, I can't help him!" Zelda

"Trust me, milady, as an inanimate object, no one understands your pain better than I do." Fi let out a jingling sound. "Goddess, I'm honestly impressed." Fi continued after another of the strange tintinnabulations that Zelda had long ago deduced were giggles. "I've seen a loooooooot of things. But I've never seen a Link slam directly into the Bound. The boat boy got close a few times, but this is a first." Fi whistled. "Such an edgelord."

"What the hell is wrong with you?!" Zelda was shouting now, her voice, high-pitched by default, now verging on a shriek.

"Well, since you're asking, let me run some tests…" Fi trailed off.

"To start with the basics: I note 78 syntax errors, 17 name errors, 18th pending the results of the current incident, a whole host of bad arguments, and a single infinite loop we've been iterating for several thousand years, of which your part is only a small subroutine."

"What the fuck." Zelda deadpanned.

"Don't get your garters in a twist, milady. They're chiffon, aren't they?"

Zelda was at a loss. Fi was even worse than a hundred years ago. When Zelda had brought the sword to the Lost Woods for safekeeping, Fi had been rambling non-stop. It was as if someone had unstuffed a spigot and several millenia of highly pressurized thoughts had come pouring out. In fact, that's probably exactly what had happened. By the time they had reached the Great Deku Tree, a century of silence hadn't sounded like such a bad thing.

"Forty four seconds until brain death, by my calculations. Princess, grab my hilt." Fi was suddenly serious. The darkness around them was oppressive.

"I can't-" Zelda started, and then stopped, because she could. "How?"

"I'm a magic sword, you're a magical girl, or at least magical girl-adjacent. Don't worry about it too much" Fi explained, or rather didn't even attempt to.

Fi continued: "Okay, now for the sheikah slate. I think this weirdo keeps it strapped to his fanny pack -ahem- utility belt, yep there it is. Okay, use me to start the warp sequence, I think you know where we're going."

Zelda did. She banged on the sheikah slate with the hilt of the sword, scrolling over to the map and selecting a destination as she had seen Link do a hundred times before. For some strange reason, the slate responded to her, though it had only ever listened to Link before. Perhaps it was the sword.

A blue glare enveloped them, and Link disintegrated into little bits of light and magic. As she watched him rise up, through the ocean, to the surface, and up into the roiling skies, she opened her mouth and took a deep breath, and disappeared.

There at the world's edge, a lambent blade floated deeper into the void, singing:

" _triumph or death to share with Siegmund:_

 _that seemed only the lot I could choose!_

 _He who this love into my heart had breathed,_

 _whose will had placed the Wӓlsung at my side,_

 _true only to him, thy word did I defy."_

She would enjoy her memories of this Link: his gleefully mad antics performed in the face of cruel fate, and the poesy they composed together, writ in the blood of Ganon's minions. She wished him happiness.

* * *

Hundreds of miles to the southwest, Zelda reappeared at Link's side. He lay unconscious in the miraculous artificial womb of the ancient civilization, the centerpiece of the Shrine of Resurrection. The fluid that nearly filled the vat suffused his half-submerged features with a cerulean phosphorescence. She couldn't help but appreciate his chiseled jawline, the finely defined muscles of his abdomen, his fashionably lengthy golden locks.

"Will he live?" Zelda asked Fi.

There was no answer.

"Fi?" She tried again. Typical.

But no, she realized. There was no answer, because there was no sword. Zelda thought back. At the moment Link had teleported away, Zelda had still held the sword. She hadn't had time to resheathe the ancient blade.

Fi had to have known this was going to happen. Somewhere in her vast intelligence, she had calculated the optimal route towards Link's survival, and if that included her floating down into the abyss, so be it. She had waited epochs between rediscoveries before, and she could wait again.

Zelda felt her own consciousness fading, exhausted from the effort of projecting for such a duration, and actually interacting with the physical medium. She sobbed a thanks to Fi's sacrifice as her phantasm vanished into the quiet air of the resurrection chamber.

Link dreamt of a lute, of a song, of a fire, and a friend, and a hideous outfit.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3: Un Chien Andalou, Beyond the Absurd

Link awoke violently in the deep of night on a bed of stone, retching in great heaves, his entire upper body clenching and spasmodic. Around him, a dark stone sphere had unfurled into two hemispheres, rotating and splitting along an invisible seam. It was the strange mix of ancient magic and futuristic technology set in stone age materials that Link had come to associate with the lost civilization which had created the guardians. The neon blue fluid which nearly filled the spherical device drained through some unseen set of tubules beneath him. He blinked in surprise at the viscous, glowing azure that came up after a few gags, he had been expecting something more navy and saltier. Looking around with heavily lidded eyes, he recognized the carved granite and elaborate blue lighting of the Shrine of Resurrection. His arms were so heavy they felt like foreign objects, made of stone and grafted to his shoulders by some cruel trickster god. He groaned, partly from the pure physical exhaustion, but mostly from the psychic pain that came with the realization of his location.

"Put me back in." He said, and closed his eyes and folded his arms, without further explanation; a stubborn child. It had taken him only moments to deduce the untruths of his lute performance; it was some sort of hallucination brought on during the shrine's healing process. The first century he spent on the granite slab at the center of that mechanical womb had been full of such false experiences, more concrete and memorable than any dream.

He could still recall those dreams; in them he had saddled giant birds and fought Ganondorf atop the rim of the sky, ran with four legs and befriended a shadow-skinned princess, and slipped into the void beyond the edge of the world in some sort of metal craft to challenge a great scaled beast in the space beyond, among many others. At the very least, these experiences were not his, if they were real at all. A great deal of his interest in photography since his reawakening was related to the flood of false experiences. It wasn't just about recovering his memories, it was about differentiating between the real and the fake ones.

Link curled himself around the hollow feeling in his chest like a dead leaf. It had probably been another century since the fall of civilization. The remnants were probably beyond saving. Back to bed it most definitely was.

He remembered sinking down through the ocean, and Zelda's ethereal hands stretched helplessly towards him. It had to be her who had gotten him here. How she had done it was one hell of mystery, but this wasn't the first miracle she had worked for his sake. She just wouldn't let him go.

After a stubborn thirty seconds, and no activity on behalf of the ancient contraption, he let out a fierce string of curses, and neatly dismounted the stone bed of the medical sarcophagus.

"Have it your way" he whispered, teeth bared in an angry expression only vaguely approaching a smile. However Zelda had gotten him in the ancient machine, it had been quite unorthodox, because he had awoken fully armored and equipped, dressed in the same stuff he had nearly drowned in, rather than in the skimpy compression shorts he had found himself in last time around. Fine by him.

* * *

Halfway to the shrine's exit, as Link ran a wobbly left hand along the intricately chiseled murals on the walls, he heard a decidedly inhuman gurgle not twenty feet away. Bokoblin? The muted, arhythmic pit-pat of soles on stone that followed, and the shrill yet guttural yelps, confirmed Link's suspicions. That audibly drunken gait and the screech that sounded like it's maker was gargling a mouthful of tiny, screaming goats could only come from a species entire phylogenetic forests away from Link's humble perch on the upper branches of the primates' evolutionary tree. He couldn't see it yet, but a bokoblin was close. Good. Link was pissed.

He reached his hand over his shoulder, intending to get the drop on this particular exhibit of gnashing teeth and savage pseudo-intelligence. His fingers closed on nothing. Mouth in an idiotic 'o', Link hurriedly patted down the rest of his body. Nothing. The hero, swordless.

This wouldn't be the first, or even the five hundredth, time he would come up with a creative means of murdering monsters. But it was one of the first times it wasn't optional. Swiping an arrow crackling with electricity from the quiver at his waist, he snuck forward in a crouch.

In his sword's absence and the surprise it had inspired, Link had lost the sound of the bokoblin, and he approached the doorway ahead cautiously. He passed the empty stand upon which he had recovered his sheikah slate at the start of his second adventure. The wall was a mess of faintly glowing dots and lines like tangerine constellations, and the embossed carvings adorning the doorway were swirling, twisting abstractions, except for where they were weren't. In some places, the hewn stone eerily resembled eyes, ever watching.

Small arcs of electricity bit at Link's fingers, and a tiny tendril of smoke rose from his right ring finger where they had singed a strand of hair. He ignored the pain and gripped the arrow more tightly as he passed through the curved entryway. The room beyond was lit by soft blue lamps, their bulbs approximating static flames. They let off a smoky light, insufficient for any true visibility, but just enough to make out the edges of a few nearby objects: wooden boxes, empty chests, and the glint of a bokoblin's spearhead, coming in hot.

Link bent his neck almost languidly, eyes never leaving the now-screeching form at the base of the spear. The spearhead shaved a few hundred strands of long blonde hair off above his left ear, but no blood was let. He grabbed the wooden shaft to prevent the bokoblin's retreat, took two purposeful steps toward, and jammed the charged arrowhead into the base of the gremlin's jaw. For a few moments, the creature's oversized bony mandible was visible beneath its skin as it conducted the arrow's electricity, and then it was over.

Two more wailing shapes emerged from the darkness, one swinging a jagged sword so short it barely deserved the title, and the other brandishing a studded club. The second bokoblin reached him first, and as it swung its bludgeon where Link's head had been moments before, he was able to make out a sick variety of sharp objects embedded or awkwardly adhered to its surface with a black tar. There were tried-and-true standards: nails and barbed wire, and personal touches: orange-ish patches of fur and what appeared to be the handle of a cast-iron skillet jutting out midway up the club. Then there were some truly barbaric additions. Among these were a number of probably human molars, set roots-up and steeped in black tar, circling the tip of the club. Several were cracked and jagged-edged from repeated impacts, but a few looked brand new.

The crown gem of the club was a single, half-crushed, eyeball at the base of the vicious bat. It bobbled back and forth beneath the overly long, chipped, and yellowing, nails of the squealing goblin. The eyeball was only recognizable as such because of the barely visible portion of white, unsmushed sclera and brown iris, and from the still-wet, striated muscles which normally held the eye firmly inside of its socket and assisted with its rotation, but here served as a crude, bloody string affixing the deformed sphere to its new home near the base of the mad truncheon.

Link eyed all of these strange decorations in a few seconds, and only fully registered what they were upon later, traumatized, recollection. However, as desensitized as he was to the horrors of bokoblin battle culture, and despite the fact that he hadn't fully grasped the true insanity of the cudgel's designer, the hero was taken aback for a moment. Then, survival instincts took over, and he whipped around to let the club screech off the shield on his back in a shower of sparks.

While the club-wielding bokoblin was off balance, Link lept in low and tackled it to the ground. They tumbled over the edge of the small stone platform where he had first entered the room and on to the floor a few feet below, Link landing hard on top of the silver bokoblin with the distinct cracking noise that belongs only to bones breaking. On all fours inches above the beast, he watched it's labored breathing and saw the helpless fear in its eyes, Link realized that something in its spine had broken, and it could not move. Above and behind him came insensate ululations, and he jerked his head sideways to see the remaining bokoblin leaping down from the platform, toothed dirk in both hands. He rolled as it landed, and it's short sword pierced its paralyzed fellow's ribcage instead of Link's back. While it was in shock, and it's nestmate bleeding out and immobile beneath it, Link wound up a steel-toed kick and crunched it into its skull. The bokoblin reeled backwards and landed on its curved back. Link approached the beast and it let out high-pitched groans and clawed blindly at the air either in pain or some last ditch effort to defend itself. He raised a knee, and brought his armored sole down mercilessly on its head several more times than necessary, watching with a dark look on his face as its eyes ruptured like overripe grapes and violet blood and black smoke emerged.

After a few moments of silence, the hero surveyed the rest of the long, dimly lit room to no avail. A giant bowstring let out a bass twang from the other end of the room, and a javelin crackled by Link's torso, impacting the wall behind him with an ugly crunching noise and an explosion of electricity. Only one species of Ganon's minions fired enchanted arrows of that size. How the hell a lynel had snuck its way into the shrine of resurrection was beyond Link, but it was between him and the exit, and it already knew he was here, so the swordslessman had only one option.

* * *

Half an hour later Link emerged from the dark cave in which he had been returned to life twice now, with a heavy, curved blade in one hand, and a large haunch of lynel meat in the other. The sun was dipping down below the edge of the earth, and he walked mechanically down towards the memory of a bonfire where an old dead king had once given him a task, looking for a place to cook himself some dinner. That felt like, and may have actually been, lifetimes ago. In his gloom and exhaustion, Link had no eyes for the gradient of twilight colors decorating the horizon, but, upon seeing the place of his memory, he gave a visible start.

In the vanishing light, a blue-tinted eidolon sat next to a pile of sunset embers, under a the rock overhang next to an apple tree. Her figure was insubstantial and shone strangely in the newborn night, gleaming like gossamer in the light of the dying fire. She was beautiful, and she had been waiting for him.

Her lips curled at one end into a quivering smile as she registered his approach, and tears began to leak out of happy emerald eyes as she sought his. She opened her perfect mouth, and spoke:

"Sup dickhead?"

He smiled almost painfully wide, eyes and mouth crinkled to the extreme. No illusion of Goddess or Ganon could mimic that acerbic wit.

"Been a minute-" Link began, and coughed. His voice had cracked, hard. A laughed jerked out between her now-audible sobs, and she stepped quickly and deliberately towards him.

"Been a minute, huh princess?" He tried again. Link's own facial meteorology was also an unabashed mix of sun and rain as he opened his arms for her phantasmal embrace.

She stopped just short of passing through him, and stared deeply into his eyes from not two noses away. Then the touch of her translucent lips on his was the tactile equivalent of white noise. Her tongue tasted like static electricity. He didn't care. It was her. It was really her.

Their love was intangible, his corn-ass, stimuli-flooded, lizard brain told him as he kissed her unearthly lips, so the whole her being a ghost thing was a non-issue. Fuck materiality, he'd go full shrine monk, do a weird yoga pose for a couple decades, transcend the physical plane, and they'd ghost this whole bitch. They kissed for what might've been a long time, or what might've been seconds.

Then she actually bit him.

"Ow! Zelda! What the-" He didn't even understand how she had been able to bite him.

"Bastard." She whispered. Then she said it again, louder. "Bastard." He tasted iron in his mouth as she beat, not lightly, but neither with her full strength, at his chest. Her small spectral fists slid through the skin of his pectorals and left his heart and lungs with an incomprehensible itch.

"You! With the wall- the water- what the fuck! What the fuck! What were you thinking?"

"I-"

"You were going to leave me!" She screamed at him, and she looked up at him, and he looked into her, and then, he _hurt._

He hurt in a way he hadn't in a long time. Since he had woken up that first time in the stables, to a world unchanged despite their triumph over evil. Maybe even before then. Perhaps since he had last felt her touch, her real touch, as he faded away from anemia and exhaustion in the cracked shadow of Fort Hateno, among an army of broken guardians.

He began to cry then, a well and proper bawl. For himself, for the emptiness in his heart which had nearly allowed him to sink into nothingness, for the scars on his mind after all these years of violence, but most of all, for what he had put her through. He collapsed gradually to his knees, and she went with him. He held her like a lifeline, a hug almost impossibly tight given her immateriality. It felt wrong, he had meant to comfort her, but she seemed to understand. They held each other, and wept, and kissed.

Hours later, they lay together in the rich loam under darkness' warm blanket as the last of the fire went out, hand in hand, kintsugi-webbed hearts peering out together towards the moon as it dripped up the sky.


	4. Chapter 4

Author's Note: After careful consideration, I have decided to raise the rating of this story to M. It is with great pain that I announce this news, but as I feel some responsibility for the no doubt irreparable psychic damage I have already submitted the *innocent* youths of this site to via the vulgarity and violence of the previous chapters, and given that the following chapter includes scenes involving strong hints of their favorite three-letter word: secks (after that is juul, or so I hear), it is high time, or perhaps even past time, to tighten the spigot of corruption so that only those over the age of consent (or anyone else with fingers and the will for it) can access this particularly awful bit of offal.

* * *

Chapter 4: The Second Coming, Heart of Darkness, Blemmyes/The Second Going

He lay on his back in the shade of their stone overhang, chewing absentmindedly on a stalk of tabantha wheat, with his hands intertwined behind his head, and his shirt off. The wheat was a leftover ingredient from the wildberry crepes he had whipped up earlier that morning, a torturous experience, given her inability to eat them. Now though, the wheat punctuated a studly peasant farmboy aesthetic, which she certainly did not mind.

They had spent the morning in comfortable quietude, communicating through gentle touches, shared smiles, and whispers. The codependence at the core of their newfound calm was also evident by yardage: the distal end of his furthest phalange was at no point further than ten feet from her own, and most of the morning theirs were locked together. She acted tough, but even losing sight of him was a prospect she didn't really want to deal with the thought of. She was pretty sure he felt the same way.

She had explained to him that rather than another century, the resurrection crèche had spat Link back out in a mere six months. It probably had something to do with the fact that Link had been just barely dead this time, whereas he had been little more than a bloodless cadaver by the time the Sheikah tribesman had managed to install him in the device the first time, but she kept those grisly details to herself. Link's relief at the relatively short passage of time, and her ongoing presence, was palpable. He strode around their little campground loosely all morning, even whistling to himself at one point.

However, in the last few minutes, a darkness had come over his features, and he had begun to grind the stalk of wheat between his teeth, working his jaw nervously. It was making her anxious. She was about to ask what the hell was wrong with him when he spoke.

"How...how can we touch?" Link asked apprehensively, as if this was something fragile enough that knowing the how's and why's would destroy it, and she would up and vanish into thin air.

"No clue." Zelda let the mystery linger, before continuing. She sat by his prone form, one arm out to support herself, the other gesturing lazily.

"I think Fi might've done something, changed the rules or something. When I saved you, I used her."

"Used her?"

"Yeah, she said grab her, told her I couldn't, but your lips were literally blue, so I figured eh, what the hell. And it worked." Zelda galloped through the explanation, keeping her thoughts focused on Link's abdominals rather than the memory of his near-drowning, with some, but not too much, effort.

Link raised his eyebrows, either at her terseness, or her semi-abashed staring. His brow got the cute little wrinkles symptomatic of something Daruk had once called the "cons" : confusion, consternation, concentration, or constipation. Zelda giggled out loud at the memory, and the lines in Link's forehead deepened as he looked at her for another explanation.

"Nothing," She said nonsensically, waving her hand back and forth, as if to clear the air. She had a tendency to speak in incomplete clauses when her mind got going. "Never mind. But anyways, Fi was the first physical interaction I'd had in a century, hell of a rush." She looked down at him meaningfully. At that, Link smiled, a big bold thing that, coupled with the heavy-lidded look that had come into his eyes, let her know he had picked up on her flirtatiousness.

"Speaking of physical interactions and hell of a rushes-" Link pulled her down as he spoke and rolled her lightly on to her back, while rolling on top himself.

He leaned down to kiss her. She threw her arms around his well-muscled back and latched on to his lower body with her legs, until she was hanging off of him from below like a baby sloth. Zelda play wrestled with him for a while from there, shaking back and forth trying to tip him over, sneaking in guerrilla kisses here and there. Link was, as expected, rock solid, and her efforts were for naught.

The whole thing was one of the weirdest bits of foreplay Zelda had ever engaged in with him, and soon the two of them found themselves on the ground laughing at their own antics. She was inordinately relieved that the distance and time that had separated them wasn't impeding their intimacy. Of course, this was due in no small part to her own efforts.

She was the one who had pointed out how hot he looked in the noon sun doing his sword exercises with his new blade, and recommended he come lay next to her. Then she had chosen her words describing her interface with Fi very carefully, to inspire exactly this sort of behavior. Zelda let out an evil little giggle at her diabolical success. Then she felt the bulge straining against the seams of his trousers and protuding well into the folds of her dress between her legs, and her little giggles turned into full-fledged snorting guffaws in a moment of dumb hilarity.

Distracted, Link looked up from her neck, which he had been working his way down with kisses. She was snort-laughing so hard her face must've been tomato red and she was breathing in short gasps, truly at the height of her attractiveness. He stared at her with another case of the cons.

"Dicktion." She let out breathlessly, by way of crappy explanation. He just rolled his eyes, still smiling, and continued kissing his way down towards her chest and beyond.

* * *

The seal containing the princess and the calamity hung low off the ceiling of the throne room, sheathed in and suspended by toxic black ooze. It was shaped like a colossal heart; as in the cardiac organ, not the ideogram; the actual people juice pumper, aorta and ventricles and all that, not the numeral 3 rotated ninety degrees counterclockwise and stacked on top of the lowercase v. Yes, the great sac in which the avatars of power and wisdom had struggled and slept, slept and struggled, for the last century plus looked like a human heart, at least, if a human heart was swollen with spider eggs, and the spiders were ready and rearin' to hatch.

It bubbled and wriggled intermittently on most days, but in recent months the intensity of the tumble and churn beneath the skin of the jumbo heart-sac had amplified. In even recenter days it had begun to writhe and convulse so frequently and with such energy that it had eschewed its resemblances to both the aforementioned human organ and the cache of unborn insects, and now hewed more closely to a gargantuan belly distended to the point of grotesquerie, which was perpetually being, from the inside, kicked, punched, and otherwise beat by all manner of unidentifiable monstrous limbs for which there exist no devoted verbs to denote a battering by. It was a swollen cell on the verge of cytolysis, or the hot core of a star about to go supernova.

There was a packed menagerie of whys, wherefores, and becauses for the enhanced activities of that misshapen lump of darkness, but the primary reasons were two in number. Reason the first: the centennial anniversary of its sealing had also been the approximate half-centenary of its magical sealant's expiration date. It had really only contained Ganon this long because of the blood, sweat, spit, and tears of the sleeping beauty also encapsulated somewhere in that broiling orb. As time had now marched on a few years past the century mark, and the hero was still playing truant, things were getting more than a little dicey in Hyrule Castle.

Reason two: In the last several months, the soul of the princess had willfully vacated her body with both increasing frequency and greater duration. In the expiration of the seal, her consciousness had been recovering, though glacially, from the hazy stasis of the last century. As she came more and more to, she had been spending more and more time projecting herself to the hero's side, for the sake of both of their sanities. In the last few days, her mind had not returned to her skull even once. Whilst the correct decision in terms of mental health (and physical health, at least for one ideating and intentioned hero), this had left her actual body, and the seal containing the calamity, decaying at a rate far faster than normal.

Her bodily abandonment did enable an increasingly stronger manifestation of her projection, which, along with the meddling of administrative unit Fi, gave her astral shape a solidity verging on that of her actual one. But the clock was ticking, and the tighter bound the bits holding her soul's shape got, the looser the bonds between the atoms of her body would be, until it fell to dust and her mind had no place to return to.

So there they were, beauty and the expressly evil beast, their prison beating like a broken heart mid-marathon at the center of Hyrule. Then, for just one moment, the black heart stood still. And, once again, from its lumpy form shot a beam of blue light, a great bestial limb, and a stone-shaking roar.

* * *

Link lay contentedly, even in the blind, magisterial light of dawn, next to his heroine, guardian, rescuer, love. Zelda. He continued to lollygag his way through all manner of favorable descriptors for her (fae queen, court jester, warrior princess) while carnal flashes of the prior day and night shot through his mind, accompanied by spikes of endorphins and dumb grins. Such imagery was obtrusive, but not unwelcome: the curve of her ass pressed up against the base of him; the arch of her strong skinny back; her long hair, now more lucent than translucent, splayed across his chest as she rode atop him. He worried for a moment that he was reducing her to a bundle of anatomical parts rather than a human being, but as he beheld her still-sleeping form, there was a fullness in his heart and wetness in his eyes that dismissed all doubt.

He was wrapped around her sleeping form beneath a thin blanket that, in concert with the remains of last night's fire, had quite effectively staved off the gentle chill of midsummer night. Now, however, in the dew evaporating light of the quickly rising sun, the blanket was beginning to get oppressive, and Link could feel the sweat beading on his chest and arms.

His left arm especially was radiating heat, but as it was beneath Zelda's head, serving as a pillow substitute, and entirely asleep, it was proving difficult to extricate. After ten or fifteen seconds of strategizing, Link prepared to slide his arm along the cleanest vector to freedom, pins and needles be damned. Then Zelda shivered, and smushed herself farther into his chest.

"..."

In the stubborn glow of the few remaining embers and the burgeoning dawn light, Link grabbed the bottom of the blanket with his feet and awkwardly shuffled and pulled at it until it covered the entirety of her bare feet. Then he ducked his head under it and tucked the edges in beneath the two of them until they were properly swaddled, the thin blanket like a sweltering cotton cocoon.

Some minutes later, Link felt a strange itch in his sternum, as if the bone itself needed scratching. He crooked his neck until his chin touched his throat and he could see down at his chest, then arched his eyebrows at what he found. The tip of Zelda's nose was inside his chest. The cartilage only just barely dipped into his sternum, but nonetheless it was both visually and tactually obvious what was going on. He shifted backwards slightly until her nose was just brushing up against his pectorals.

Sleeping Zelda apparently didn't like this. She groaned, and with her eyes still closed, pushed her head forward until not just her nose, but her entire face was submerged below the skin of his chest. If she opened her eyes, she probably would've been staring directly at his beating heart.

Her transition to solidity had been so sudden that it raised some alarms in Link's head, so he was almost relieved to see some signs of ghostliness. However, he wasn't about to let her face into his chest cavity. They were close, probably about as close as two people can get given all they'd been through together, but not that close. He gently grabbed her by the shoulders, and relocated her to an intimate, rather than literally suffocating, distance.

Then she grabbed his arms, and headbutted his ribs, or rather she would've, if she didn't pass right through them and out the other side. After a moment of shock, Link rolled his eyes.

"I had thought you were awake." He said accusingly.

The only answer was a muffled giggle rising up out of his own throat, probably one of the strangest bits of ventriloquy Hyrule had ever seen. He was having a hard time telling which one of them was supposed to be the crazy one these days.

Link had the very uncanny feeling of having something large removed from his torso, but without any pain, and glanced down to see Zelda's innocently smiling face staring up at him.

"Morning babe." Her tone was nonchalant. "Wait, why is your face so red?" She sounded half-concerned, half-amused.

"Uh, it was hot."

"Really, that's weird, I'm pretty cold."

"I know."

She looked up at him suspiciously, and then noticed the blanket still enveloping them and his sweat-soaked undergarments. She got a miffed look on her face, blushed a little, and looked away.

"Idiot."

He just smiled at her.

Zelda looked at him again, gave him a smacking kiss on the cheek, and threw the blanket off the two of them. She leapt up, wrapped it around herself like a cape, pointed at the risen sun, and shouted:

"Onwards, ho!"

The effect of this proclamation was amplified by her complete nudity, and Link found himself simultaneously laughing and doing his best to imprint the glorious image permanently in his mind.

Then, there was a great purple glow, overwhelming the morning light. It was followed seconds later by a deafening bass hum, and then another, and another, and another. Massive beams of light shot from the four corners of Hyrule towards the epicenter of its depravity. Link recognized these beams, mouth agape in a look of horror. He started hyperventilating. His head rotated slowly, almost unwillingly, towards Zelda, like an old wind-up toy. Next to him, the blanket cape fluttered to the ground, empty.


End file.
